The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for establishing and maintaining membership within a federation infrastructure. A joining node submits a join message to an existing federation infrastructure. The federation infrastructure routes the join message to a processing node. The processing node facilitates identification of predecessor, successor, neighborhood, and routing nodes (for the joining node) within a ring of nodes. The joining node exchanges messages with identified nodes to obtain state information for the identified nodes and other nodes within the ring. Nodes periodically exchange state information, including state information for other nodes, such that state information for the ring is efficiently propagated to all nodes in the ring even when communication between some nodes is lost. Instance IDs, phase values, and freshness values are used to determine when state information is stale and/or is to be updated.